Black-Native Autobiographical Acts: Navigating the Minefields of Authenticity

The book "IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas" explores the experiences and history of a multiracial group often overlooked. It challenges notions of authenticity in relationship to mixed-race subjectivity and argues that people who straddle Black and Indigenous identities in the United States unsettle biological, political, and cultural metrics of racial authenticity.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 198 pages
Publication date: 15 March 2023
Publisher: Lexington Books

In 2012, an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian titled "IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas" shed light on the experiences and history of a frequently overlooked multiracial group. This book seeks to address this erasure and contribute to the growing body of scholarship on people of mixed African and Indigenous ancestry in the United States. Drawing on considerations of authenticity in Life Writing and questions of authenticity in relation to mixed-race subjectivity, Cannon examines how Black Native Americans navigate narratives of racial and ethnic authenticity through various autobiographical forms. Through close readings of scrapbooks by Sylvester Long Lance, oral histories from Black Americans formerly enslaved by American Indians, the music of Jimi Hendrix, photographs of contemporary Black Indians, and the performances of former Miss Navajo Radmilla Cody, Cannon argues that individuals who identify as both Black and Indigenous in the United States challenge biological, political, and cultural notions of racial authenticity. The creative ways in which Afro-Native American people have negotiated questions of belonging, authenticity, and representation over the past 120 years demonstrate the empowering potential of expanding definitions of autobiography.

Dimension: 227 x 162 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781793630599